Month: March 2017

Young Market Researchers, Do You Want Good Work-Life-Balance? Don’t Earn Your Promotions “On Credit” If you are a newly-hired market researcher at a CPG company, you will probably notice two things. The first is a burning suspicion that everyone expects you to be the last one out of the office everyday. The other is that […]

Krisis: My Favorite Kind of Focus Groups Krisis focus groups are meant to encourage conflict. This, as I have mentioned before, is the reason why they are my favorite kind of focus group. “Krisis” is Ipsos’ brand name for version of debate-style or conflict-style qualitative research. Instead of using focus groups to find commonality or […]

Social Insights: When to Use Them What are social insights? How are they different than social media? What are they good for? These are questions that we often hear from our business partners. In a previous post, we talked about barriers to organizations adopting social insights. In this post I’ll discuss why we believe they […]

Why Trial Should Be Spelled “T-R-I-A-A-A-L” As we’ve said before, trial is the most important component of a volume forecast. What we didn’t talk about, is what drives trial. Since trial is so important, I want to dedicate this post to understanding the three components that determine trial. I like to call them “The Three […]

Three Awesome, Nielsen, Quantitative Research Capabilities That are Not Named “Answers” When you hear the name Nielsen, or ACNielsen, you probably think about TV ratings. I take that back. 90% of you will think of TV ratings, and the shopper insights managers will think POS Scanning and Homescan Panel. Either way, the Nielsen company offers a […]

Three Barriers to Accepting Social Media Research Methods A common question I get from friends and mentees in the market research industry is, “Why are social media research methods so hard for my organization to adopt?” This is a good question. Especially as more and more social media research companies emerge. In a world with slick, […]

Three of Our Favorite Ways to Get Survey Data Quickly and Affordably Sometimes you just need survey data. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just need the data. Spending two weeks waiting for a Purchase Order and another four-to-six weeks to get the survey data back isn’t always possible. Wouldn’t it be great if there […]

Let Go of What’s Precious and Focus on the Research Recommendations Think about the research results presentations you have seen in your career. There’s a pretty standard flow to them, right? They usually go something like this — starting with Objectives and ending with Research Recommendations, with a bunch of stuff in the middle: Introduction […]

Navigating the Politics of Concept Testing There is nothing in the world of market research so deceptively complicated and political as concept testing. This can be especially frustrating because a concept test should be one of the most straight-forward and elegantly simple pieces of research a market researcher or insights manager has to field. I […]

Is Your Business Question a Puzzle or a Mystery? Do you find yourself suffering from “analysis paralysis?” Do you have a business question, but are so stuck in the data that it seems impossible to answer? Maybe the problem is that you need to take a step back and try to understand what kind of […]